subject: Murder And Fire In The Pacific Northwest [print this page] Strange and horrible things have been happening in the Pacific Northwest over the past couple of months. Most people have probably heard about the tragedy involving the deaths of two small children Charles and Braden Powell, aged 7 and 5. Their father murdered them, as well as himself. He brought them into his home in Puyallup in what was supposed to be a supervised visit, but shut the social worker out of his house. He then attacked the children with a hatchet, and then set the house on fire. The trio died.
While it is always terrible to hear about the death of a child, especially a murder, this was the third time in less than a year that fathers in the Pacific Northwest killed their families with fire as a weapon. In Vancouver, as well as Medford, similar attacks and murders occurred. In the Medford case, the father Jordan Criado survived the blaze. The use of fire is quite rare in these types of murders. While criminals will sometimes use it to cover up criminal activities, it doesnt seem as though that was the case at all in these instances.
Something else was at play, and it takes the mind of forensic psychologists and specialists to start to attempt to understand it. Why would the murderer choose to use fire as a final statement? In several of these cases, the family members were stabbed, or attacked with a hatchet first. Why the fire? Psychologists who are working on understanding these types of family murders with and without the use of fire say that fire use is not typical.
One of the things that all of these families have in common was a father who was in some type of turmoil. In the case in Vancouver with Tuan Dao, financial issues were one of the main issues, along with a divorce. Criado was a convicted sex offender even before he married and had a family. At the time to the murders, he was unemployed and facing a possible divorce as well. Josh Powell was at the center of an investigation that was famous throughout the nation. He was a person of interest in the disappearance of his wife several years earlier, and he was likely to lose custody of his children.
It seems as though all of the men had issues that caused them to break. Did the men fear losing their families and through some twisted lens believe that the only way to keep them was to murder them? It seems that may have been at least a part of it.
